We’ve got two DVD versions of Osborne’s play which students can borrow from the Learning Resources Centre ( LRC ) directed by Judi Dench and Tony Richardson. The Judi Dench TV film is available on YouTube. As is the Tony Richardson version split into two parts; 1, 2, 3 and 4. There is an interview with Osborne broadcast in 1957 on ITV. You can also watch a Tony Palmer programme on the playwright John Osborne – The Gift of Friendship.

If you fancy a trip to see his first editions, uncorrected proofs and ephemera related to the launch of his films visit the British Library’s John Osborne page and you’ll also find a link to his papers in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center in Austin, Texas.

This week the Learning Resources Centre (LRC) team have been getting ready for the Women into Management (WiM) set of inductions starting on 28 February.

Our LRC Manager will be giving the students a tour of the library, showing them how to search the catalogue on and offsite and use our self-service issue computer to borrow material. As we’re a small college – and only have one issue computer – we show the students how to use the barcode reader to issue material on their borrower card one by one. If there’s 15 students then obviously this takes a while so the team decided to create something interactive that we could load onto the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) as a reminder.

As the team were strapped for time – and didn’t want to spend hours editing a film – they first tried doing a video on the iPad. But it seemed a bit shaky and unprofessional almost like a scene from Acorn Antiques! Then we tried downloading Jing to do screencasts but still needed a video rather than a screencast to demonstrate how to scan with the barcode reader. Our LRC Assistant found Storyboard That a piece of freeware/subscription site where you can create comic strips that you can then embed into websites, VLEs or share with others.

Our Access to Higher Education students are doing two pieces of American literature for their English module. They are reading Turn of the Screw and The Yellow Wall paper.

Project Gutenberg is a free source of ebooks available in different formats like ePub, html and Kindle which you can download and use on ereaders or use with adaptive technology like Natural Reader if you have for example dyslexia. There’s an audio version of the Henry James’s Turn of the Screw on there too. There’s another audio book version on YouTube broken down into parts. Here is Part I.They’ve also got the BBC version of the book adapted for television starring Downton Abbey’s Michelle Dockery.

Discover more about Henry James and test yourself on the Literature Network’s Henry James page. There’s also a Henry James page on the Literary Gothic website with useful links to other works, ebooks, information about the author and analyses. There’s critical analyses of Jame’s novella on SparkNotes: The Turn of the Screw and Shmoop. Take a look at historical literary critiques of the work on The Turn of the Screw website.

Don’t forget Saturday 8 Feb is National Libraries Day highlighting the importance academic, public and workplace libraries make in the United Kingdom. Watch out for events in your area on the National Libraries Day website.